


tremens

by jouissant



Category: Rome (TV 2005)
Genre: Multi, Orgy, Period Typical Attitudes, Porn with Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:07:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25055194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jouissant/pseuds/jouissant
Summary: Were there a temperate god with whom he could lodge complaints, Brutus would be certain to address the patrician tendency to allow a perfectly good party to spiral out of control.
Relationships: Mark Antony/Marcus Junius Brutus the Younger, Mark Antony/Other(s)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 57





	tremens

Brutus dislikes orgies as a general rule; they are not conducive to meaningful discourse, which is the only reason he attends parties in the first place, and thoroughly boring to watch if one is not participating. Were there a temperate god with whom he could lodge complaints, Brutus would be certain to address the patrician tendency to allow a perfectly good party to spiral out of control. Had he foreseen the endgame of this particular event, he would probably not have come. Yet here he sits, squarely on a divan at the fringes of the action, fingers wrapped bloodlessly around his cup of wine.

Cicero eases himself down beside Brutus. “This is a fine state of affairs, isn’t it? But I’d expect nothing less to welcome Mark Antony home from Gaul. One would think he’d had quite enough barbarism for one lifetime.” 

“Is Antony here? I had not noticed.”

“You’re joking, surely,” says Cicero. “This circus bears all his hallmarks. Look around you. They’ve brought in one of everything. And there- the man himself. Never let it be said he does not wriggle down to our very lowest expectations.”

The room is close and cloaked with incense, and in the center of an outer ring of low furniture is a roiling mass of flesh of all forms and hues. There are men and women and at least a couple of eunuchs, bald in the Egyptian style. Every inch of exposed skin is gleaming with oil, flickering in the torchlight. Beyond the cacophony of moans the only sound is the burble of talk from the spectators and the endless throb of some low drum music. And sure enough, just as Cicero said, there in the very center of the floor is Antony, naked as the day of his birth save a pair of golden wristlets and a generous rouge about his cheeks and chest. The flush may well be cosmetic, but Brutus has his own ideas about its origins. 

At the sight of him, Brutus hums. “Your mistake, friend Cicero, is that you have any expectations of Antony at all.”

Antony’s body is slighter than his partner’s, but not by much. It is workmanlike and scarred in the manner of a career soldier, but there is a gymnastic grace, a loveliness yet about it that Brutus recalls from long ago. He is currently being breached by a rather hulking individual. Greek, if Brutus had to guess, and not unattractive if one favors a soldierly corpus and is not overly picky about faces. But this is immaterial, as Antony does not face him. He sits astride the man’s thighs, propped against his chest and looking out towards the room as though performing for an audience. His gaze soon finds Brutus and Cicero on their bench, and when it does he flashes a blissful smile as though to tell them both what they can do with their expectations. Brutus takes a long swallow of wine. His eyes hold Antony’s over the rim of the cup.

Brutus can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Antony recently, but despite the circumstances he looks as he ever does in Brutus’s memory, conjured by word of mouth or gossip, or by his letters, which wend their way to Brutus from the far corners of the world.

As Brutus watches, the Greek grips Antony by the hips and lifts him only to drop him upon his cock again. Brutus can hear Antony’s resulting grunt clear as day from across the room; a lesser man might quail to be so deeply penetrated, but Antony only looks wilder and more pleased. He turns and slaps at the Greek’s arm in a kind of thrilled encouragement, spurring him into yet more fervent motion. The slap of skin on skin that results is nearly deafening.

Brutus swallows. Beside him, Cicero coughs. When Brutus turns to look he appears immediately absorbed in his wine. His ears flame. Brutus can hear the wheels turning in his mind already. Cicero is the sort of person who cannot bear to be excluded; he will sit here all night in horrified contemplation and damn Brutus by association. What screed is he penning? Will he dissect the general nature of Roman decadence, or will he turn his eye to one particular participant? 

“I may go,” Brutus says, as though the thought has just occurred to him. “I’m tired. Everyone of interest has left already.”

“I was just thinking the same,” says Cicero, sounding relieved. “Ought we to go and find our hosts?”

Brutus does not look at Antony as they rise from the divan and quit the room. He cannot say whether he feels Antony’s eyes at his back, but he certainly feels something.

Their host has long retired himself, and his wife is in no state to recall whether or not they have made their excuses. Brutus lingers while Cicero tries anyway. When he extricates himself Brutus follows him as far as the threshold. Cicero gives him a curious look; perhaps he thinks Brutus plans to pursue instead some late night errand, some sojourn with a lover. Let him, thinks Brutus. His mother often tells him he would benefit from—how does she phrase it? More openness in his private life. She would love it were Brutus to slip off and meet some patrician’s daughter, some unsatisfied wife. She would love it even if it were only gossip. She would not love what Brutus intends to do now.

When Cicero is gone Brutus does not send for his own retinue. Once the litter bearing his erstwhile friend is out of sight at the end of the street he looks about him, and when he sees no one but slaves he turns and slips back into the house. He claims another cup of wine, and with only a modicum of guilt he steals back into the room he and Cicero have just vacated.

At first Brutus can’t locate Antony in the crush of bodies, the sweet smoke of the room; he casts about with as much subtlety as he can manage. He feels as though an onlooker would know his mind, know immediately whom he seeks, though of course this is impossible. When Brutus spies Antony at last he has abandoned his Greek to lie with his head in the lap of a woman Brutus does not recognize. Her hair is colored the ruddy purple of a mallow flower and arranged in a patrician style. The hair between her legs is dyed to match, bright against Antony’s when she presses her thighs to his face.

Behind him is another woman, face brightly painted, who penetrates Antony with a phallus clutched tightly in her small hand. Brutus can see the muscles of her bare arm rippling as she thrusts into him over and over, Antony’s belly tightening as he bears down on the object. Slimmer than the Greek, thinks Brutus vaguely. Can Antony even feel it? Antony lies on his side, one knee pressed into his chest. His cock, which Brutus spies only in rosy glimpses, is shining at the tip. Antony does not lie idle; as Brutus watches the purple-haired woman writhes and shouts, and Antony clutches at her flank. He moans against her body, and when he lifts his head at last his face is wet, dark lashes glistening. He sighs and kisses the woman’s trembling thigh. She rakes her lacquered nails through his hair and leans to speak to him, pressing her open mouth to his. He arches back onto the golden phallus. Inside Brutus, something like a fist furls closed.

And so it goes for a longer period of torture than Brutus would care to admit. But was that not what he intended when he returned to the party? He had not been long in the room before Cicero arrived beside him, and though he’d had an idea Antony might be here he had not truly looked for him until Cicero pointed him out. For this is how it is between Antony and he. Brutus would no sooner approach Antony in public than Antony would him, other than to exchange pleasantries, and only when pressed. The words that pass between them now come in writing or in dreams. Brutus feels as though in being here tonight, in seeing this, he limns close to something he ought not to. And yet he sought it out, and has no intention of leaving. He has always felt some mastery over his body but despite the rising heat he is glad for the heavy drape of his toga. Other spectators are less contained, and look a hairsbreadth from joining the fray themselves. Brutus shifts in his seat and leans back on his hands.

Antony rests his head in the purple-haired woman’s lap. Brutus’s fingers curl to see how she cards her hands through his hair over and over, how she wipes his fevered brow with a stray wisp of silk. He has rolled over onto his back. The phallus has been discarded, the woman who wielded it kneeling to look between Antony’s legs as though to inspect her handiwork. She gives a pleased cry and sits up on her heels. She beckons across the room then, and when Brutus sees who answers her signal he understands the point of the phallus at once.

The man who joins them on the floor could go eye to eye with an elephant. He must have come from the arena, or perhaps he’s the centerpiece of some legion, manning a catapult or a battering ram. His cock is practically as long as Brutus’s forearm and at least as thick, and to see it Brutus must fight the urge to go to Antony and force himself between him and the girl, against the advancing gladiator. But oh, how Antony moans to see him! Hearing this Brutus could never deny him, no matter the sourness gnawing at his heart.

Antony is so open, the gladiator so slicked with oil, that he is able to kneel between Antony’s legs and drives home in a single smooth motion that jolts Antony’s entire body back into the woman’s embrace. He cries out, an abject noise that would trouble Brutus were it not for Antony’s beatific expression. If there was yet some fight in Antony when he fucked the Greek before, it has all gone out of him. He sprawls on the pillows and allows himself to be taken in a manner that would shock even the most liberal Roman brain. Brutus glances around him. Who is seeing this, he wonders? Who is cataloguing Antony’s ragged breaths, his groans of pleasure, gut-deep and raw? Thank the gods Cicero is gone. Perhaps this has given Antony leave to truly unbridle himself. But on the heels of this idea comes a darker and less welcome cousin: if Antony believes himself relieved of Cicero, then perhaps he also feels unfettered by Brutus.

The gladiator holds Antony by the hips and lifts him. Antony clutches the woman’s arms for purchase; she is stronger than she looks, for she bears Antony’s weight well, grins eagerly down at his body, a taut span of muscle stretched between her and the gladiator like a calf on a spit. Antony’s eyes are closed but not screwed shut; his face is slack and his mouth slightly open, lips swollen. The woman who bore the phallus had been curled beside his head. She moves to crouch astride Antony’s face, and holds the golden shaft to her pubis as though it were her own stiff cock. Antony chases the head of it, gulping like a fish. She laughs and runs it over his lips. He swallows her with a moan of gratitude. Brutus chews at the inside of his cheek.

“Look at him,” the woman gasps, hand shaking at the base of the shaft as though he is truly pleasuring her. “He is so industrious.”

“He would make a lovely pleasure slave,” sighs the mallow-haired woman, petting Antony’s cheek and cupping her hand over the bulge there.

Brutus bristles; surely Antony will respond to such disrespect, but if anything he appears flattered; he sobs around the golden cock in his mouth and levers himself desperately against the gladiator, who holds him with trembling arms and slides near free of him only to drive home with the force of a fired arrow. 

Brutus finds himself focusing on minutiae, as though his mind is no longer willing to take in all that lies before him. The scene grows fractured, as tiles in a fresco. He is taken with the sole of Antony’s foot, the arch and flex of it; the tanned dorsum striped pale from the straps of his sandals. As he watches, the gladiator grasps that foot, uses it to push Antony’s leg back like a lever and bury himself inside him. Brutus’s gaze falls to the man’s arse, knows that every grind and clench will meet its twin in Antony, who has begun to quiver all over. The woman has moved off of him and sits with her head on her companion’s shoulder, her hand moving between her legs.

It is she who finally notices Brutus watching. She smiles slowly, as Antony had before. Maybe it brings them satisfaction to be observed. To his horror she beckons to him. _Come,_ she mouths, and he cannot abide it, cannot allow a woman to see him thus, so unabashed. But she will not stop looking at him, as though she thinks she can encourage him with only the force of her gaze. She cannot, she will not. He looks away from the group, looks down at his own hands. He has only sound to guide him. Relieved of his gag Antony is free to give voice to his pleasure with the same ragged moans as earlier. As Brutus listens they grow ever higher and more strangled in time with the slaps of the gladiator’s loins against Antony’s arcing, supine body, the image of which crowds Brutus’s imagination, a golden bridge between dream and waking, between Mark Antony as he dwells in the world and as he roams in the secret, twilit recesses of Brutus’s memory.

“Oh, make him finish,” call the women, clapping. “How he aches for it.”

Brutus is weak. His head snaps up.

The gladiator regards Antony with an expression of determination, as though he has never had a more important task set before him. Unbidden Brutus thinks of Cicero: a party, he had said, to welcome Antony home. Perhaps he had not merely been speculating; perhaps the whole affair has been orchestrated, and this is to be its necessary culmination. Indeed, those revelers who are not otherwise engaged rise on sleepy limbs and gather to watch with unrestrained enthusiasm. There is cheering and hooting as in the arena. There is the smell of sweat and sex. Brutus soon loses his vantage from the low divan. With not a little shame he rises and draws nearer, eking his slender frame through the crowd.

In the humid middle of the circle Antony grapples with his climax like a wrestler. Brutus feasts upon the sight of his body. His chest soaked in sweat, nipples like bronze coins. Whorls of dark hair thickening to a thatch at his groin. The undersides of his thighs. The smile he wears, as though he would be no other place. His eyes darting below the lids, as though he is asleep and dreaming. Antony is resplendent in his submission. Brutus has never seen anything like it. As long as he lives he will not get free of this knowledge. If he ever had a chance, tonight has put well paid to it.

The gladiator moves to fist Antony’s cock, but Antony bats his hand away. He absorbs thrust after thrust like a battlement under assault, shaking with the force of them, choked with tension. When he comes it is untouched, and with a great bellow of victory. His spine is a bowstring, his pale issue loosed in fat drops over his belly and chest. The gladiator growls and shudders into him. The crowd cheers to see it. A swarming blackness crawls into the corners of Brutus’s vision. He drops his swimming head and allows himself to be jostled and shuffled, to sink onto the floor.

The crowd disperses like smoke, so that when Brutus comes back to himself he is nearly alone, as though he has been left on stage to deliver some final monologue. The gladiator has retreated. The women walk off hand in hand. Only Antony remains, sprawled on the cushions in the center of the room, anointed with oil and semen. Brutus is unsure what to do. Surely, he thinks, someone will return to help Antony up and out of the room. Surely he is not to be left here, wrecked and then discarded. He waits. No one comes. The drumbeats have stopped, and if he hears any talk it is distant and unintelligible.

“Antony?” he calls. There is no answer.

Brutus curses under his breath. “Antony,” he says again. A groan perhaps, a stirring. At least he isn’t dead. Brutus crosses the floor to him, tripping over his own sandals. He kneels at Antony’s head and shakes him by the shoulder.

Antony’s eyes flutter open. “Brutus?”

He half expects some rib—Brutus the stoic, caught out at an orgy—but Antony merely smiles, warm and guileless. He lifts a hand to Brutus’s cheek. Too late to retreat, Brutus allows himself to be palmed clumsily, allows Antony to run his thumb along his lower lip. Brutus could lick it, if he only freed his tongue. He could say all sorts of things the same way, but he doesn’t. 

“Have you come to fuck me?”

“What? No.”

Antony drops his hand. His smile fades slightly, but does not disappear. “Mmm. That’s a shame. Why’re you here, then?”

“I’ve come to help you. Take you home.” He has no idea where Antony is staying these days. In some barracks? Has he just invited Antony home with him? So be it, then.

“Don’t need any help. Unless you want to fuck me. That would be a great help. Otherwise, a cup of water. I’ve a great thirst. Perhaps a nap.” He groans.

Brutus can scarcely look at him. His face is still reddened, hair mussed. His own come is drying on his chest. Without thinking Brutus begins to wipe him clean with the edge of his tunic.

“You are rather lovely, you know,” says Antony.

Brutus tenses, but does not withdraw. Antony’s words skitter over him. He shakes his head. “Haven’t you had enough?”

Antony swallows. “Never,” he says. “Brutus—” 

Brutus curses. He should have left him here to sleep until morning. By rousing him he has stoked some fire, and as with all fires it must be tended, teased back to fullness or put out. Brutus’s cock pulses beneath his toga.

“Gods.” _Gods, I am considering it._ Brutus rakes a hand back through his hair. He has begun to sweat. “Will I hurt you?”

“Maybe.”

“Do not joke.”

“I’m not. You saw that last fellow, didn’t you? Built like a stallion.” Antony bites his lip and shakes his head minutely. Remembering.

Brutus gestures at himself. “I am not that.”

“No, you're not. You are very different.” Antony studies his face. Brutus cannot recall the last person to look on him so, with such familiarity, such tenderness. “Will you not lie with me?” Antony asks at last, softly. “You sat and watched all that.” 

What this is supposed to mean Brutus does not know, but when Antony clutches his forearm he abandons his efforts with the toga. He allows himself to be drawn lower down until he is lying on the floor alongside him. Antony rolls to face him. So close, he looks younger. Brutus has never forgotten how he looked at seventeen, at twenty. Now it is as if he has been stripped clean of some outer layer of grit. Now he can be, if not the boy Brutus remembers, then perhaps his logical descendent. Curious that an orgy should be required to bring it about, but then Antony always has been a man of extremes.

Their heads are pillowed close together. Brutus recalls long nights passed so, talking into the morning. Antony is docile in repose, like a great cat. Even as a youth it was so. Brutus had been captivated. Antony reaches for him and begins to touch him, running his hand to and fro on Brutus’s bare arm in long strokes, encouraging gooseflesh.

“You enjoy this debasement,” Brutus says. 

Antony yawns. “Very much.”

“It soothes something in you.”

“Is it not enough to like it?”

“Of course,” says Brutus. “You do a great many things for like of them. I was merely stating my hypothesis that this goes beyond that.”

“Is this your preferred method of seduction? If you are writing a history, I’d like to go on record as saying I’ve had better orgies.”

“Hush.” Brutus sits up straight enough to wriggle out of his long toga. He feels pinned by the weight of inevitability, inexorable though not precisely unwelcome. “You joke when you’re nervous, do you know that?”

“I am not nervous. You just have me at a disadvantage.”

“I thought that was the point.”

Divested of his clothing, Brutus settles beside Antony again. Maybe he ought to be self conscious; after all, he is naked in the middle of a stranger’s house, where anyone might walk in and see them lying here together, see this improbable combination. Yet he finds he doesn’t care.

He drapes his arm across Antony’s waist. Antony resumes his caresses, his hands roaming across Brutus’s arms, his back. When they kiss, Antony tastes of salt.

“How do you find me?” asks Antony. He has his fingers in Brutus’s hair.

“The same as ever.”

Antony laughs. “Liar. You’ve had me younger. Tighter.”

Brutus swats at him.“Stop it.”

Antony shifts beneath him. He lets his legs fall apart, grabs for Brutus’s hand and guides it between them. “Go on, Marcus. Touch me.”

The name shocks him like cold water. So too the mess on Antony’s thighs, the slick and shining remnants of his evening, seed and spit and oil. Antony’s cock lies spent against his belly. He watches Brutus intently as he moves between his legs.

“Oh, gods,” says Brutus.

“Please. Please.”

Antony is wet and open, his body offering Brutus’s searching fingers no resistance. He whines when Brutus enters him. “Does it hurt?” Brutus asks, and Antony nods.

“Don’t stop. It’s nothing.”

“Nothing,” Brutus echoes. His cock drags against a silken cushion and he sucks a breath in through his teeth. The feel of Antony, the heat. Nothing. He nods at Antony’s cock. “Will you again?”

Antony sighs. “I don’t even care. Happy to have you try.”

“Will I be nothing inside you?”

“Oh, my hare. Have I offended?”

“A legion could enter you,” Brutus says, ignoring the old endearment. He withdraws his fingers and runs his befouled hand over his cock. “Perhaps one has. I did miss the beginning of the party.”

Antony laughs. His body quakes with it. When Brutus lowers himself on top of Antony and slips inside of him he feels that laughter all through both of them, rolling sweet as summer thunder.

Antony is soft and pliant. It is clear to Brutus he will offer no assistance, so Brutus gathers him up, rises onto his knees and takes him that way. “Wrap your legs around me, come on.”

“Command me as your slave. Did you not hear the lady earlier?”

“I cannot understand you.”

“You do not need to. You only need to take your pleasure.”

Brutus bites his lip. “I will not take you as a slave,” he says. He knows Antony well enough to understand that no matter what he says, neither of them will find fulfillment in such a game. Brutus does not have the strength of Antony’s other partners, nor their particular endowments. His is a perfectly suitable patrician cock. He is not vain about it, in truth does not think of it much save in moments such as these, in service to a need not strictly his own. 

Antony does not meet Brutus’s thrusts as he did the others. Rather, he accepts them, muscles lax, a dog showing his belly. He is a vessel into which Brutus pours and pours. Water, wine, milk: Brutus is jealous of them all. He aches to be inside of Antony all ways, to course along the cracks and rough places in him that can never be altogether mended or smoothed.

He woke with Antony one morning long ago, saw him burst from sleep as through the surface of a rough sea, gasping and fighting for breath. Brutus had gentled him, touched his face. There had been a wildness in his eyes, one that seemed to look upon Brutus, to take the measure of him before retreating.

 _What troubles you?_ Brutus asked.

 _Nothing now,_ said Antony. _Only--it’s funny. When I sleep I never truly expect to wake again._

Perhaps if Brutus could fill him to the brim he might crowd out all else, displace whichever malfeasant ghosts Antony fights past day to day. He thinks if he had to he would do it over and over, all along the string of days, unto both their deaths. 

They sprawl together. There is no crisis for them to hurtle towards; they only twist and merge upon the floor. With his eyes closed, upon the softness of the cushions, he can almost forget where he is. He may be alone, he may be in his own room, he may be reading a letter. He may be young again. Brutus shudders. He gasps into Antony's mouth. 

In the quiet afterwards Antony murmurs to him. “Was I good?" he asks. “Did it feel good?” 

Brutus does not know how to answer. If he had a stylus he might stand a chance of writing it. He kisses Antony's temple. In the moment, he settles for yes.


End file.
